I picked this book up off the shelf at my work's library, intrigued by the title and its promise to discuss arts, community and culture in America. Bau Graves lives and works in Maine and has a long career in running arts and cultural programs there. With his experience attempting to integrate and bring into dialogue diverse immigrant and foreign cultures with "mainstream" American culture, Bau Graves brings a voice of experience to the narrative even if that voice is not an academic voice. He falls prey to a few dangerous binaries that trouble his attempt to call for increased cooperation and a more representative cultural scene, which is a laudable goal and critical if the arts are to serve a larger social purpose.
As Bau Graves discovered and relates in Chapter 1, the dynamics of communities are complicated. It was not clear to me whether Bau Graves understood the danger of applying terms like "insider," "outsider," and "authentic." There isn't one Asian community that is monolithic here in Brooklyn's Chinatown, but many communities. While Bau Graves pays surface homage to this, it isn't clear that this understanding has deeply penetrated his thinking. He seems to think that there is a way to infiltrate the secrets of authentic (or authentic-enough?) culture, which is perhaps reflective of his work which is practically oriented (and my issue reflective of my academic training).
Sentences like "the attending outsiders miss out on the ambiance of ethnicity, the feeling of being presence of the Other" or "we're still a lot better at putting ethnics on stage than at getting them in our seats" (both p.71) are offensive in their presumption that "the Other" or "the ethnics" aren't involved in the cultural scene except as potential spectators, and in the automatic homogenizing of a white, upper middle class audience in a position of power and creation in the arts. Careless word choice here reaffirms divisions and simplistic and insulting binaries, inherited from colonialist thought, rather than undermining them. The arts are a place for Americans to break down barriers and encourage diversity that reflects our society. My academic training rigorously stressed the thoughtlessness and idiocy of Orientalizing those different from myself (which, if you think about it, includes everyone else), and I think it is necessary to deconstruct this line of thinking about ambiance, authenticity, and ethnicity and the American arts scene. It's completely unacceptable because of its sheer hypocrisy: putting "Others" on display for their novelty or considering "them" exterior to "us" reinforces preexisting notions of difference and harkens back to the late 1800s concepts of Worlds Fairs, where people of different ethnicities were put in cages for "we the civilized" to observe. I would hope that by 2010 we could think outside the cage.
Bau Graves does address deconstructing accepted norms of time and structure in America's attempt to democratize the arts,an important call to collaboration and acceptance of other world-views. Constructions of authority, time, and power structure shift across our blue planet and it is key for arts leaders to recognize and be sensitive to working with others (not "Others"!). After my experience working abroad, I can definitely attest that this is a key and necessary learning if one is to be truly collaborative. It is also noteworthy that Bau Graves articulates how precarious the cultural mediator position is, and interrogates the power of the arts administrator.
Bau Graves cites Martin Luther King, who said, "I doubt if the teeming problems of our ghettos will have a great chance to be solved until the white majority, in genuine empathy, comes to feel the ache and anguish of the Negro's daily life" (197). It is this spirit of openness and empathy which I believe Bau Graves wants to encourage, and which I applaud and join my voice to the call for an American arts and cultural scene (as well as political, while we're at it) that truly reflects who we have become as one nation of many gorgeous and unique pieces. Part of that openness and empathy comes in dropping Orientalist ideas, removing our blinders, and questioning all our assumptions to come to a place of more considered sharing and learning.
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